Nigeria Islamists kill 20 in attack on northeast: military

Members of the Boko Haram splinter group attend a media conference in Maiduguri, Borno State of Northern Nigeria February 23, 2013. REUTERS/Stringer

Suspected Islamist militants attacked a fishing settlement in northeast Nigeria over the weekend, killing 20 civilians, the military said.

The assault targeted Baga, a town on the shores of Lake Chad, until recently a stronghold for Islamist sect Boko Haram.

A concerted military crackdown in the northeast since mid-May has weakened the four-year-old insurgency, which is fighting to carve an Islamic state out of religiously-mixed Nigeria, Reuters reports.

But it has also pushed the militants into hiding, mostly along a mountainous area near the Cameroon border, intelligence sources say, from where they can launch devastating attacks.
“The sect members came armed and started shooting sporadically, killing 20 civilians,” said Lieutenant Haruna Sani, spokesman for the multinational force of soldiers from Niger, Chad and Nigeria tasked with security along Nigeria’s porous northeastern borders. The attack was on Saturday.

Baga was the scene of a clash between the multinational force and the Islamists that killed dozens of people in April – the army said 37 people were killed, but local leaders said around 185, most of them civilians, died in the violence.

President Goodluck Jonathan declared a state of emergency in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states on May 14, ordering in extra troops. Nigerian forces say their offensive has enabled them to wrest back control of the remote northeast, destroy important bases and arrest hundreds of suspected insurgents.

In response, the sect has turned its attention to civilians. Boko Haram – whose name roughly translates as ‘Western education is sinful’ – has attacked at least four schools there over the past month, killings dozens of pupils.